


(and it feels like tonight is) the edge of your sword

by lumailia



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: F/M, First Kisses, Mutual Pining, Pining, a five plus one in 2019 because i can, angst angst angst, but not m rated, gets a lil spicy, mentions of chroms dad being shitty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-07-07 22:17:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19858879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lumailia/pseuds/lumailia
Summary: The five times Robin wonders if Chrom loves her, and the one time she knows he does.A late entry for chrobin week day 3 - longing/pining





	(and it feels like tonight is) the edge of your sword

**Author's Note:**

> hello chrobin community first of all thank you to everyone who dropped kudos/love on snapdragons yesterday!!! I wrote today's fic with frobin because her pigtails bring me joy. anyway, please enjoy the messy angst bomb I drafted yesterday afternoon.

**1**

The trouble begins with a flicker behind her ribs, a tiny flame sparking in a lantern. At first, Robin thinks she’s falling ill, adding guilt to her normal swirl of worries. She doesn’t have time to be sick. It’d terrible detriment to the Shepherds, who have in such a short time come to rely on her, and she wouldn’t exactly enjoy it for herself.

As on the battlefield, proactivity is key. She tells Lissa she’s having chest pain, and the princess whips her up a tonic. Maribelle tacks on a sachet of soothing tea—lemon and mint, with a taste of warm spice—and tells her to get her beauty sleep. Miriel adjusts her glasses, watches with thinned eyes as Robin leaves the clerics to their work, and Robin tries not to think about what that lacerating gaze might insinuate.

She is used to the suspicion, now. Whenever she’s with Chrom, Frederick is usually there breathing down her neck, ensuring she doesn’t try anything treasonous. Not that she could even fathom it. On that day she awoke in the field outside Southtown, no memory of who she was, Chrom helped her to her feet and gave her a place in the world.

That’s a debt she’s still not sure how to repay.

Robin drinks Maribelle’s tea before bed. She dreams of a blue-haired girl, four years old with bright eyes and chubby fingers, sticking butterfly clips in her hair and calling her _Mama_. When she wakes, the ember inside her ribs has grown to a blaze.

Something is sorely wrong.

But she must be methodical about this. Each day, she counts the times the feeling flares, then scribbles a note on a water-pruned page of her tactics book. The more evidence she has, the easier it is to draw connections. Miriel would be proud of her.

At the end of the week, she leaves a sparring session with Chrom with a speeding heart and quivering hands and takes final stock of her list.

  1. _Dining hall, lunchtime. Right after Chrom grabbed my shoulder._
  2. _Middle of training. Had just waved to Chrom across the field._
  3. _Working on a campaign plan. Plotting myself in the formation. Flanked by Lissa and Chrom._
  4. _Chrom showed up at my door. I’d left my sword on the practice field._
  5. _Sparring with Chrom._
  6. _Chrom said we were ‘two halves of a whole.’ He’s so dramatic._
  7. _Sparring with Chrom again. I was on the ground. Virion called it a ‘compromising position.’_
  8. _Going over the plan w/ Chrom and Frederick._
  9. _Another strange dream. No tea this time. (Note: Talk 2 Maribelle?)_
  10. _C H R O M._



A pained laugh scrapes her throat. The common variable is obvious.

Robin is lovesick.

No. She’s more sensible than this. The entire idea of her loving Chrom is preposterous. It reminds her of something from Sumia’s romance novels—a tactician from nowhere, helplessly in love with a prince.

Were this a fairy tale, he would already be in love with her, too. They would have their masquerade dance, their passionate kiss, their ardent proclamations of devotion. Simply, if he wanted her, she would be his. Instead, he calls her his ‘right hand man,’ and his ‘dearest friend,’ and once, in a way that mortified Robin for no reason she knew until now, his ‘brother in arms.’

She drops her face into her hands and pushes a sigh through the grate of her fingers.

Does he love her? Probably not.

Will she wonder, anyway?

Her job as a tactician is to ask questions. Provoke the possible. That much, she doesn’t think she can help.

**_2_ **

Robin is not the only one in the Shepherds who is in love with the Prince. In fact, she’s disastrously late to the party. Cordelia can hardly take a breath without mentioning Chrom. Sumia fawns over him, chasing constantly at his heels and pestering him to try the things she bakes. Even Maribelle is rumored to have a little crush on him, though in observing her behavior, Robin is fairly certain it’s Lissa—not Chrom—who’s captured her interest.

But Robin has no interest in staking out romantic rivals, nor in being one herself. Sumia and Maribelle are her friends, and Cordelia, while still a bit prickly with her, gives good feedback on her tactics and formations. She wants them to stay on good terms.

She remains aware, though, of how much time Chrom spends with her. Much of it is understandable, considering she has become his second in command, but beyond their work, they’ve made a tiny tradition of talking after their baths, usually over a cup of tea. And of course, there are the hours they train together, him teaching her the sword to supplement her magic, and the nights they spend poring over battle plans, where he hands her pins—well, she’ll admit he drops most of them—and gives her firm advice and makes her stomach flutter whenever their hands accidentally brush. Those, Robin realizes, could be problems.

_Could he love me?_ she wonders, ceaselessly. Then she sees him talking with Sumia by the Pegasi, or Cordelia around a campfire, and she decides that it’s better for the both of them if she stops asking altogether. 

**_3_ **

Chrom’s voice shakes when he tells Robin about his father.

He stops short of taking her hands, though it looks as if he might try, with the way they seem to waver in front of him—his gaze is intense, frank, but the rest of him isn’t all there. As if he’s floating on his own uncertainty. Robin steels herself to keep from grasping hold of him, reeling him back herself. What she does do is listen. He tells her his father was a tyrant. A warmonger. That the war they’re now fighting is a fire he started.

Robin nods, understanding. There is a seeping gash between Ylisse and Plegia, and Chrom has come to feel it as a wound of his own.

Chrom clears his throat. Swallows. His voice dips low, and he tells Robin about the time he walked around the castle with his father’s red handprint on his cheek. How when Emmeryn saw him, she hid him away in her room, then snuck away to the kitchen and brought back handfuls of melting ice to dull the sting. His father called him a coward for hiding away.

Then the Exalt Alechsander joined his wife in death, and Emmeryn, still a teenager, assumed the impossible weight of his crown. 

“Is it bad that I wanted him back?” Chrom asks. Robin almost doesn’t hear him. “After I saw how the people treated Emm, I wanted him back. I wanted him to take that pain for her. I hated that he was dead. That he got to just escape everything he created. Emm is trying so hard to undo what he did.”

Robin touches him, hands featherlight on his wrists. “I know.”

“She wants peace, for everyone.”

“I know.”

“These people that want to kill her? She wants to fight for them, too.”

“But we have to protect her, first.”

He twines her fingers with his, and she curses her heart for the way it races. “I know.”

“Thank you for telling me this, Chrom,” says Robin. “I think…we’ll work better together, now.”

“Did we not work well together, before?”

“No! No, not at all. I mean, yes. We did. I just…I’m glad you trust me.”

Chrom’s face, already softened in the twilight, warms to a tempered sort of joy. “Of course I trust you,” he says. A smile cracks his lips. “How do I not trust the person who routinely saves my ass?”

Robin flashes a mischievous grin of her own. “You mean routinely _kicks_ your ass?”

“Hey, now. Our spars are draws.”

“Are they, now?”

He moves his hands to her biceps, his serious mask returning. “Robin, there’s something I want to tell you.”

“Okay,” she says. She can hear her heart drumming in her ears. Heat rushes into her cheeks. A single question sits like grit on her tongue.

_Do you love me?_

Chrom pauses for a breath, and Robin hangs on it, searching his face for any quiver of nerves, some prelude to confession, but the night has grown too dark for her to tell.

“When this war ends, and the Emblem’s fate is safe, you may go wherever you choose. I will not hold you to the Shepherds any longer than you want to be held,” he says, and Robin nearly laughs, because she’d quite like Chrom to hold her forever. “But you are my best friend, my partner, and…and I’d like you to stay with us. At Ylisstol. Emmeryn’s talked of appointing you as an advisor. We’re not sure how it’d go over with the council, but you could at least stay in the Shepherds. That is, if you want to stay. I can’t make you—I can only tell you how much it’d mean to me if you did.”

Robin should be considering Emmeryn’s proposal right now, preparing an answer, but the word _partner_ consumes her _._ It’s a term that lovers use, to describe the one they’re bound to. She wants to hate Chrom for using it so innocently. She cannot be his _partner,_ or his wife, and for all the times she’s daydreamed about it, those dreams have been nothing but dalliances in the impossible.

“Are you alright, Robin?” he asks. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

She imagines them dancing, and wonders if maybe she has.

She closes a hand over his where it rests on her right arm. “I want to repay you, for all you’ve given me,” she says, solemnly. “And I see no better way than to serve Ylisse in peacetime, as well as in war.”

“There’s no need to ‘repay’ me,” he says. “Your being here is more than enough.”

“As you say, milord.”

He embraces her suddenly, and she cannot even return it because she is too stunned at the motion. Too surprised at the way every curve and divot of their bodies fit together, the way his chest feels so strong and warm against her, despite the belt buckles digging cold at her collar.

“Thank you,” he whispers.

“For?”

“For picking the best place to fall asleep on the ground.”

He breaks away, leaving her longing for his warmth, and turns to go back inside. “We should get some sleep!” he calls. “It’s been a long, long day.”

“I’ll be in soon,” she responds, but she does not move. Instead, she watches the moonlight shimmer down his white cape, glint on the armor at his shoulder.

“Do you love me, Chrom?” she whispers, but he is too far away to hear it.

**_4_ **

Emmeryn has been captured. The Emblem’s fate is nebulous. Nerves run high, splitting the Shepherds into tactical pockets, with Robin at the masthead of a campaign headed right into the bone-dry heart of Plegia.

The schism wound is bleeding, and the blood is running into their hands.

She’s pinning an advance position for Sully when Chrom surges into her tent. Sleepless nights have smudged deep purple beneath his eyes—if he weren’t so handsome, he might look as haggard as she does, getting equally meager sleep as she plans the offenses. With fatigue pulling like a siren’s song, looking at him reminds her why she does it. She will see to Emmeryn’s survival for Ylisse, for the future of the continent, for the hope of peace, but most importantly, she will see to it for Chrom.

“Did you come in for a progress report?” Robin asks.

“I came in because I need you.”

Her stomach tumbles. “I’m here for you.”

“I need you to promise me you won’t do anything reckless,” he says. “This battle will be long—you need to keep yourself safe.”

“Chrom. This is war. You know I can’t keep that promise.”

“I can’t watch you die.”

“Then I’ll pair you with someone else.”

“I won’t allow it,” he says. “You are my partner, Robin. I don’t want anyone else.”

_Do you love me?_ “What will I do then, if you don’t want me to be reckless?”

“Have faith in me,” he pleads. He takes her face in his hands, and the world seems to drop out from under them. “Have faith in us.”

And then his lips are on hers.

It is no fairy tale kiss—his kisses are messy and fervent, too much teeth and spit, and Robin is too overcome with nerves to do much kissing back. He opens her mouth, running his tongue along the seam of her lips, and she starts to relax, starts to like it, starts to think _Oh gods above, Chrom is kissing me,_ and that’s when he decides to wrench away.

“I’m so sorry, Robin,” he stammers, wide-eyed and red down his neck. “I don’t know what came over me.”

The back of her throat is paper-dry. “That’s okay,” she whispers. “You can go now, if you want.”

“I will.”

He leaves, staring at the ground, and Robin collapses winded into her chair.

Chrom kissed her, and it was awful. Yet her toes are still curling in her boots.

**5**

_Do you love me?_

The words nearly reach her lips, but then a gasp swallows them as Chrom’s mouth presses warm against her ribcage, bringing the pleasant scrape of teeth against tender skin. Tomorrow, she will look in the mirror and see all the marks that vein and twist across her ribs, her stomach, her thighs. They will alarm her, but only for the fact that she is the only one who will see them, that he will not spend the next night and the next after that in her arms again, kissing the bruises until they turn green and fade into her skin.

This is for comfort. A one-time arrangement, born of grief and desperation. Emmeryn has been dead for six days. Chrom has been alone for five. He is a better kisser when Robin is lying beneath him, but it’s his hands, callused and reverent, that have her wringing her fingers in the sheets.

He does not love her. Tonight, he would’ve taken anyone. She was simply the one who was there. _He does not love her._

Then he sighs her name into her hipbone, and she almost believes that he could.

**+1**

It is a long, long road back to Ylisse.

As they pass through the south of Ferox, signs of the coming spring wander out of the earth—green corkscrew grasses and tiny animals, tall yellow flowers with triumphant buds. The snow has melted, too, macerating the roads to thick, soupy mud. Robin is thankful to be on horseback today.

Chrom pulls his mount up beside hers. The cold has put a flush on his face, swiftly reminding Robin of their night two weeks ago, which she had tried, and subsequently failed, to forget. 

“Faring well today, Robin?” he asks.

“Well, I’m not trudging in the mud with the other infantry, so I suppose could be worse,” she says. “Yourself?”

“Fine,” he says. “Have you thought at all about my proposition?”

Robin quirks an eyebrow. “Proposition?”

“To serve as an advisor,” he replies, though his voice falters. “It’d be good to have you around the palace.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

He looks out to the path ahead of him. “Well, if I’m being honest, there’s another title I think would suit you better.”

“That is?”

“How about, ‘Queen of Ylisse?’”

She glances at him, flabbergasted, but he’s clearly serious—his face is cast in that sweet, hopeful smile she’s missed since his sister died, while a more serious yearning simmers in his eyes.

“Chrom,” Robin stammers. “Do you love me?”

“I do love you, Robin,” he says. “Is that a problem?”

“No, no,” she says. Her chest is on fire. “I’m just…bewildered.”

“Really? I thought I’d made it obvious. But I’d be happy to remind you, if you wanted—”

Robin laughs. “Where did you get this confidence?”

“Nowhere!” he cries. “I was just watching you ride and thinking of how much I loved you.”

Her tanned skin doesn’t normally change much in color, but she figures she must be redder than him by now. “So you proposed to me?”

“You could call it a test run.”

“Insufferable prince, you are,” she says. “I can’t believe I’m in love with you.”

“Oh. Oh good,” he says, staring down at the reins in his hands. “This is good.”

“And now you’re being shy?”

“You kill me, Robin,” he says. “I think that’s why I need you.”

She smirks, though her heart is still soaring. “Maybe it is.”

**Author's Note:**

> "you kill me, Robin" YEAH SHE SURE DOES HUH ah i love awakening. still traumatized from that opening cutscene. 
> 
> thank you for reading!!!!!!!


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